environment + technology

BrightSource signs world’s biggest solar deal – again

photo: BrightSource Energy

California utility PG&E on Wednesday expanded an agreement with BrightSource Energy to buy 1,310 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to be generated by seven giant solar power plant projects – the world’s biggest solar deal to date. Coming on top of a 1,300 megawatt agreement with Southern California Edison in February, the Google-backed, Oakland, Calif.-based startup says it now holds more than 40% of the Big Solar contracts in the United States.

PG&E had previously signed a power purchase agreement with BrightSource in April 2008 for 500 megawatts with an option to buy another 400 megawatts. The new 1,310-megawatt deal will supply enough electricity to power about 530,000 homes in California.

Those are impressive numbers, but not an electron of electricity has been produced yet. BrightSource now faces the challenge of licensing, financing billions of dollars in construction costs and then building nearly a dozen large-scale solar power plants to meet a 2016 deadline for the Southern California Edison (EIX) contract and a 2017 completion date for PG&E (PCG). (The big wild card is whether transmission lines will be available to connect the power plants to the grid.) The first PG&E project is set to go online in 2012 with the first SoCal Edison solar farm to begin generating electricity the next year. Those first two power plants are part of a 400-megawatt complex BrightSource is planning for the Ivanpah Valley on the California-Nevada border.

“The biggest part of our strategy is to ramp up slowly and methodically,” BrightSource CEO John Woolard told Green Wombat. “We’re very, very careful about how we sequence the projects.”

To give you an idea of how arduous the licensing process is in California, consider that BrightSource filed its application to build Ivanpah with the California Energy Commission on Aug. 31, 2007 — the state’s first large-scale solar power plant application in two decades. But the energy commission currently estimates that it won’t sign off on the license until around 2010, more than six months’ behind schedule as a multitude of state and federal agencies and green groups weigh in on the project’s environmental impact. The clock is ticking as BrightSource needs to start shoveling dirt on the construction site by the end of 2010 to qualify for federal loan guarantees that are part of the Obama stimulus package.

BrightSource may also build solar power plants in Nevada and Arizona, where licensing is easier, to supply electricity to PG&E and Southern California Edison. Woolard says the company controls enough land for nine gigawatts’ worth of solar farms.

While BrightSource’s technology is untested on a large scale, the company has built a six-megawatt demonstration plant in Israel, where its technology development arm is headquartered. BrightSource deploys arrays of mirrors called heliostats that concentrate sunlight on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The intense heat vaporizes the water to create high-pressure steam that drives a standard electricity-generating turbine.

Woolard says an independent engineering firm, R.W. Beck, has validated the technology at the Negev Desert demo plant. That no doubt helped persuade PG&E, which has sent executives to Israel to inspect the project, to supersize its contract. (And while BrightSource represents the biggest solar deal PG&E has signed, it’s probably far more likely to be fulfilled than the utility’s agreement in April to buy electricity from a space-based solar farm to be built by Southern California startup Solaren.)

“What it came down to is that they saw us delivering,” Woolard says. “Our plant in Israel performed above expectations. The fact that we have a solar plant producing the highest quality, highest temperature, highest pressure steam anywhere in the world is the most important thing.”

The company’s pedigree also provides a certain amount of corporate comfort. BrightSource was founded by American-Israeli solar pioneer Arnold Goldman, whose Luz International built nine large-scale solar trough power plants in the Mojave Desert in the 1980s that continue to generate electricity for Southern California Edison. BrightSource has also raised more than $160 million from a blue-chip group of investors that includes Google (GOOG), Morgan Stanley (MS) and VantagePoint Venture Partners as well as a clutch of oil giants – Chevron (CVX), BP (BP) and Norway’s StatoilHydro.

C’mon, you know the answer to that question! All we have to do is build an aquaduct from the surrounding lakes to siphon all their water. Also, we can redirect all water supplying the San Joaquin farmers. All the wildlife and the farmers don’t need this water anyways.

Come on Scott… they are going to build it close to Ivanpah Lake… oh, isn’t that lake dry now??? That must mean there is no water there… we will have to use trucks that use fossil fuels to bring the water to the solar electric steam generators.

Good point!

Why don’t we build a flux capacitor (from Back to the Future)? It would generate 1.21 gigawatts of power out of trash.

Better yet, how about we get rid of the bureaucratic chokehold the multiple government agencies have on society and build some nuclear plants along the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and other major rivers. A move like that would create jobs for the unemployed workers, and supply safe, clean power to the entire nation. We are almost like socialist France now… we might as well power our country like them.

Most steam-driven power plants operate on a closed loop, and thus only require a finite amount of water. In other words they won’t be draining water from anywhere: they will essentially need one delivery of water during construction. While running, the system will continually create steam and re-condense it back into water before it is passed back into the boiling phase.

Y. Campell is right. Their system should be closed loop so does not constantly need water. But, the problem with water is that it looses temperature fast causing fluctuations in the plant output overnight or when a cloud comes in. I wonder how BrightSource tackled that problem. Plus, a six-megawatt plant can hardly pass as a proof-of-concept for the colossal solar towers they need to build. Giant solar towers may pose unique engineering challenges which do not even surface in a small prototype.

The area all thermalelectric plants use water is in the condensor. It’s theoretically possible to use an air cooled condenser but I’m not aware that anyone does. The water then goes to a cooling tower where some is lost to evaporation.

Well to clear up a few points. Yes water is a huge issue. What others have said is true that the “steam cycle” is a closed system. It does use some water but in reality it is a tiny amount. The real user of water in most systems is the cooling system. It can use a huge amount of water lost to evaporation.

Now Brightsource is planning on using an ACC (air cooled condenser) for cooling and it is also a closed system. If it works right it will use a tiny amount of water also. They are actually pretty common now days. They basically work like a car radiator. The problem is they are not very efficient. They require a lot more electricity to run all the additional fans and pumps than a traditional evaporative cooling tower. They also have a hard time in very hot temperatures like they will be experiencing in the desert. If the cooling water gets too hot then the efficiency of the plant drops way off. You can also hybrid the cooling tower on hot days and use a combination evaporation and ACC. Problem all of this cost money.

Now as far as water losing temperature very quickly this is really not true. These plants are very well insulated and hold temperatures very well. They will lose heat very quickly if they are trying to produce power and are not getting enough sun. They are able to ride out small clouds very well and will produce a much flatter power curve than photovoltaic. They are not designed to produce power at night. There are some discussions to do so on other plants but these will not do so at the present time.

I operated solar plants designed, by the same people who are going to build these plants, for over five years. They really are very good engineers and I can see some things that should be major improvement over the previous trough systems. I hope it works for them. We will have to see.

If they use liquid sodium instead of water as the heat sink, then they can generated power for up to two days without the sun shining. They still need to use water to produce the steam to turn the turbines that drive the generators.

As far as tapping a large source of water for cooling, it would depend on location. If there is a nearby lake (man-made or natural) they can tap that, or perhaps pipe in water. It doesn’t have to be fresh water either. It may be possible to pipe in salt water from a nearby ocean and then return it back into the ocean.

While the energy from the sun is free, there’s NO FREE RIDE when it comes to power generation. There will always be costs, regardless. The main point is that this solar solution offers the most benefits with the least amount of negative impacts.

My only question is…. WTF took so damn long? This type of solar solution was suggested more than 20 years ago! Third world countries have been using this type of power generation for at least 10 years.

Plus, a six-megawatt plant can hardly pass as a proof-of-concept for the colossal solar towers they need to build.
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I think that the scale up may consist from a number of solar towers, not one super tpwer

To Jay F in Orlando – There is nothing “clean” about nuclear energy from the mining of the uranium all the way out thousands of years when the problem of storing the waste products will still be a problem. Every speck of life on our planet, all hundreds of millions of years of it, has been made posssible 100% by the sun. Solar energy and the wind it generates is our only option. It’s always been that way. The real problems is we, the one’s with the biggest brains, think Mother Nature can be told to step aside.

Finally somebody makes sense: Nuclear Power! Yeah, it needs cooling water. Plenty in the Great Lakes! Oh Yes! That might warm the lakes?! Maybe a hundredth of a degree? Probably not even that! Look at Lake Superior for just one of them. You could travel for two thousand miles on that lake alone and still not see all its shoreline! Give us all a break and break the environmentalist/comintern/fellow traveler chokehold on our plant approval process and put America back to work. The luddites won’t go peacefully, so Napoleon’s ‘whiff of grapeshot’, figuratively or more, may be needed. Those obstructionists and fear mongers are holdovers from the cold war anyway when commie agents and useful fools infiltrated our educational systems with the departure of the patriotic classes from college campuses in 1967 to fight in ‘Nam. With patriots gone, the subversives moved in. And stayed! First they took over the faculties, then the regulatory boards of various states like California. They had various agendas but stayed true to only one, especially after the fall of communism from relevancy in the nineties. That was the goal of weakening western societies no matter what the means was sacrosanct.
Workers need jobs! Now! To get jobs we need cheaper energy. Now! To get that cheaper energy we either waste a whole generation of young men to graves in futile wars over diminishing resources that really
DO pollute the world, or we put that generation to work building a better future for Americans. The enemy believes ends justify the means and so should we. Send all our obstructionists and fellow economic saboteurs back to where they came from, muslim terrorist nations and the communist empire….oh that is only China now, and Burma, and China is communist only in name but not in practice…so that leaves the muslims who will put them out of the present world’s collective misery in short order, probably by shortening each one by about a foot off the top on arrival. Out of fear, CNN’s management will not publish this, but like the loss of fifty house members to Gingrich’s republicans in 1994 over an issue whose essential truth was never publically admitted then or now–gun control, this issue will not go away. It will not be printed away. People are hurting! And there are MANY of us! Leaders will arise from among us who will neither be ignored nor silenced.

Well I was very impressed with steves response. Nice job.
While I’m new to the solar energy debate, I have been a fast learner in the last year in a half.
The solution seems to be fairly simple for the water, but a logistics nightmare. The Saudi’s have desalination plats all over there country to provide fresh water.http://greenprophet.com/2009/05/14/8981/saudi-arabia-desalination/
Desal plants take a lot of energy ( in comes the solar power) and you use this to supply the fresh water, and use the left over resources from desal to sell to vendors. ( I understand that some solar system use molten salt to do their thing) The biggest problem would be how to run a pipeline from the ocean to the interior to supply the water to convert to fresh water, because no one wants it in their back yard. Just my 2 ¢

How long will it take before desalinization becomes an option as a water source? We are being told that the polar ice caps are melting and are likely to cause flooding in certain areas of the world. Maybe by converting saltwater to potable water we could prevent possible future flooding and lessen the worry about running out of water.

Anyone have any idea what the electricity will cost? If a contract is signed, it should have been for a set amount for electricity. For most solar plants, the contracts have been signed for between 300-450 dollars/MWh if no thermal storage is included, and I’d be terribly surprised if this were any different.

So, California regulators take 3 years to approve the building permit because of concerns by different groups, BUT they will take energy from Nevada or Arizona. In other words, we don’t want the solar energy if it will impact our neighborhood, but we will take it if it only impacts YOUR neighborhood.

Clouds are handled by thermal storage system; molton salt is generally used which is stored in huge insulated holding tanks. This gives the system 24-72 hours of additional power production depending on the design and allows for power after the sun goes down. I find it very disturbing though that oil companies are investing. For all their talk they work awfully hard to subvert good ideas (I should know, it used to be my job). It is a lot like the tobacco industry claiming that they want fewer smokers.

The big issue is whether or not one of the “green” groups will succeed in bringing the project down by stopping the transmission lines that would bring the power to the cities. The Sierra Club and its brethren have been battling to stop every major wind and solar project in this country. People should stop supporting these groups, as it’s becoming obvious they care less about alternative energy, and more about their political power.

How about “Solar 1” – it has been in operation form almost 20 years, in the desert. I think the thermal agent is not water but some sort of a chemical, water is used only in the cooling stage (which I believe is air cooling, similar to what you described).

Has anyone tried using the ground for cooling? The desert is very cold at night and at certain dept the temperature is pretty constant…

“highest temperature, highest pressure steam anywhere in the world”. In a system that happens to cycle on a daily basis. I’ll assume bank financing is a must given the amount of the investment, which means performance guarrantees. Getting someone to guarantee the performance of a massive facility scaleup with fluctuations in operating conditions like these will probably prove to be the projects biggest hurdle.

The cooling water needed in solar thermal plants is much less than the amount of water preserved globally due to non CO2 emission. Remember, no energy is pollution free. We can only try to reduce the overall pollution, using CO2 less methods and consuming less and less energy

Rather than dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into bailing out businesses/industries that caused their own demise, why don’t we all pay for projects like this and re-employ those people here? It just boggles my mind how the way things are prioritized in this country.

Can someone explain why the water used to create steam needs to be cooled that much? As long as it recondenses in to water, even if just below boiling, can’t it still be sent back to the boiler? or are we talking so much heat needing to be shed to get that steam back to water that air cooling systems need to be huge?

Small note: the Flux capacitor didn’t produce power, plutonium did. And later a ‘Mr. Fusion’ which created the 1.21 gigawatts via cold fusion, something about as realistic as safe, (note: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island) clean, (note, nuclear waste with a half-life of 1,200 years) nuclear energy.

And if we were like socialist France, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job with health insurance benefits.

WOW, ok so alot of massive misconceptions going on here. Little bit of correction:
1) Liquid Sodium is not used at the heat medium that converts the heat to electricity, it is for storage of energy and later usage.
2) When the water evaporates it turns a turbine. Salts would not only corrode the metal of the fans, it would also destroy the piping. Also, this installation is in the Californian dessert. The sea is FAR away. The great lakes, EVEN FARTHER!
3)The Water shortage will not be a factor. The water in the steam-turbine system is closed off and only used for transfer of heat. No water exits or enters the piping or reservoirs.
4) Cold Fusion is being worked on in labs across the world, but it’s extraordinarily hard to create, stabilize, and harvest the energy of.
5) The creation of jobs will not be a direct solution of the auto / banking system implosion. Mostly, Detroit workers don’t want to move to California, Iowa, and Texas where the wind jobs are. Also the southwest can’t support that much influx of people, it doesn’t have enough water or resources if they all moved to take advantage of the available Solar and Geothermal sources.
6) Finally, and i can’t stress this enough, this IS NOT a a new technology. BUT it is finally efficient enough to use in mass power generation.

If interested research Solar Tower power production systems. They are the most efficient and best scaled carbon neutral power source currently available.

Note to all: If you don’t know ANYTHING about generating electricity just SHUT UP! You can’t use seawater because the minerals would DESTROY the turbine.The cooling is required at the condencer where massive amounts (about 250-1000 GPM per Megawatt depending on unit size)are needed to condense the steam back into water as it exits the turbine. It’s physics. You can’t bs your way out of it. The only thing the “green fairies” know is that they are against evrything for no reason at all. There is a negative component to every potential energy source. Be an adult, make the informed choice and move on. Or sit in a dark cave with a candle.

“Small note: the Flux capacitor didn’t produce power, plutonium did. And later a ‘Mr. Fusion’ which created the 1.21 gigawatts via cold fusion, something about as realistic as safe, (note: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island) clean, (note, nuclear waste with a half-life of 1,200 years) nuclear energy.”
Ok, so while cold fusion is unrealistic it would be absolutely safe and 100% clean. Your comment (excluding the fact that cold fusion is impractical) is completely ignorant of the fact. Cold fusion is not the same as what is currently done in our nuclear reactors; they use the fission process. Fission reactors require an unstable (radioactive) isotope that will break down (fission) to smaller elements that in turn are radioactive. Fusion however, involves essentially smashing two hydrogen atoms together to form a completely non-radiative helium atom. In short, the “waste” produced by fusion reactions is non-radioactive and 100% safe (hey, its not even a green-house gas!). Secondly, the threat of a fusion reactor posing the same threat as Chernobyl (let’s not talk about Three Mile Island as there was no meltdown there, and one could argue that no radiation was released either; but that is another argument to be had another day) is nonsense. Again it comes down to the difference between the processes used to generate power (fission vs. fusion). Fission reactions are self-sustaining (which means they will continue to run on their own even if you completely shut down all the power, and allows them to run away as happened in Chernobyl). Fusion reactions are not self-sustaining unless you are under very special conditions, which is how current fusion reactors work. However, to terminate a fusion reaction you only need to pull the plug on the reaction chamber, unlike fission reactors.
Power from fusion reactions (which we can’t currently sustain long enough to get power out of) is clean and safe; power from fission reactions is problematic. Remember, fusion generated power is the power of the future, and it always will be.

Why are we still trying to centralize power generation. With the advent photo voltaic every house can gereate their own power. This would reduce the demand from cetralized stations and provide power in the event of a national emergency where power stations can be compromised.

If you use steam to power a turbine, there will be a need for water make-up since the systems suffer some loss; regardless of the cooling source – splash cooling towers, air cooled, geo-thermal, etc. Thus far water (splash fill or similar) has been the most efficient cooling medium, thus the least expensive, unless you try to get it from a rock in the desert.

Power production is not simple, just lots of simple comments. It would serve you all well to understand power production, the waste by-products, the emmissions, labor, corosion, stresses (physical and mental), etc. If you want power in the future, cleanest possible for a resonable cost and delivered when its needed (sooner than a decade), then you better understand all of the above and get over the NIMBY attitude. (Not In My BackYard)Life is full of give and take; NOTHING is FREE!!

Why is power still centralized? Because that is the only way the utility/power companies can make money from us. It is not in thier interests to promote renewable energy or self generating energy customers because then they won’t have customers. The world will be a better place, but they won’t be able to count on the ridiculous sums of money they make now.

Gosh, Bill from Phoenix, you’re right. I bet no one ever thought about that. Oh, wait, maybe they have and the solar power equipment is actually designed to work in the environment its being place. Thanks for the insight.

I’m fine with solar, but not with this approach, because you are using up another precious resource, namely water. Plus, these solar farms are going to be a bligh much as the oil rigs back in the day became quite hideous.

PV’s are STILL both very inefficient AND very costly per actual usable watt they produce. Most efficient PV’s out there at best in full sun do 20% to 25% conversion – and even partly cloudy conditions quickly drop that number to unusable. Large field collectors that concentrate all the suns energy into a media that absorbs and uses most of the energy focused on the collectors are much more efficient.

Well there have been many interesting (and mostly misinformed) comments on this subject. I am far from an expert on all renewables but I do understand solar-thermal and conventional power generation very well. Now to answer a couple of the comments on here. Yes it would be very possible to use ocean water to run a solar-thermal or any steam plant for that matter. There would be no problem running it in the cooling tower and it could be treated (demineralized) to run in the steam cycle. In reality even “fresh” water must be treated to run in the steam cycle. The problem is there are very few good solar sites next to the ocean and the cost of piping it to the plant and back would be prohibitive. If Brightsource is able to make the air cooled condensers work then water use will really be kind of a non-issue. Yes some water will get used but pretty hard to get too fired up about it, especially since it is being built right next to a fairly new (and very nice) golf course.

Ok about the comments the sandstorms will destroy the mirrors. I think that was one of the lines in the movie “Sahara”. To be fair yes there is some damage to mirrors caused by high winds. This is a different system than the one I am used to operating but will work basically the same. There have been many improvement in mirrors over the years and breakage is way down. During extremely high winds the mirrors are turned help protect them.

On the cost of producing power from a solar plant I am not sure where the numbers of $350-450 a MW came from. The original SEGS contracts are complicated and at times approach those numbers. The last project built in Nevada has a contract for about $180 a MW. These number are still too high but new designs should be able to bring the costs down but it remains to see how far.

As far as using “liquid sodium” or any other heat storage medium, there are no plants in the US currently using it for energy storage. The current designs use a heat transfer oil that is capable of storing some energy but only a very small amount. The main reason no heat storage is being planned is it would be expensive and there is simply no financial incentive for doing it at the present time.

One last statement. I am a fan of solar-thermal but it is far from being able to run the country. It does show a lot of promise but many issues need to be worked out. The simple fact is that while it has been around for a long time not much work has been done to improve it until now. There are also several other designs that I am excited about. We will have to see which ones work best and hopefully these will be at least part of the solution.

1)Quality, longer lasting vehicles, cars that last 25-30 years
2)Predicting the parts that will fail and expecting to replace them
and the neutral process required
3)Changing the Fuel, from oil to less oil or to other types of energy
4)Allocating driving privilages and rewards
5)Vehicle standards for other auto’s safety, ie height requirements

Is one of the more obvious example where green business doesn’t fit
with the goal of GDP. Always America’s problem is take home pay,
break even replaceable business/products.
Kristina Brooker

About Green Wombat

Green Wombat is written by
Todd Woody, a veteran environmental journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and Yale e360. He's one of the few people on the planet who have held a northern hairy-nosed wombat in the wild.

Todd formerly was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.